As harmless as
their intentions may be, some
wildlife can
be extremelydestructive
to your property.

The Trapper Guy
will come out and humanely
remove the live animal
from your property. I will fix
the damage caused and make preventative
measures so they won't return.

With proper wildlife
control we can co-exist
with our wild neighbors.

*
24
hour services are for emergencies
only. Live animal in a living
area where safety of the occupants
is in question is considered an
emergency.

Lutz,
FL news

Limits
proposed on homes per acre in semirural
area of Lutz

By Richard Danielson, Times Staff Writer
In Print: Friday, March 6, 2009

LUTZ
— Part of Lutz near New Tampa should
get new safeguards to preserve its semirural
character, county planners say.

But those protections
won't come in the form planners discussed
with residents last month.

Instead, the Hillsborough
County City-County Planning Commission
proposes to limit new subdivisions in
an area south of Interstate 275 and
north of Curry Road to no more than
two homes per acre, according to a proposed
amendment to the county's comprehensive
land use plan.

That means new subdivisions
would have to follow the pattern established
by four small subdivisions previously
developed inside the area: Fichenwalk
Country Home Sites, Curry Cove, Livingston
Oaks and Sutton Estates.

"It'll accomplish
what we want," said Denise Layne,
past president of the Lutz Civic Association.

Previously, the planning
commission had floated the idea of removing
the area from the county's urban service
area.

Hillsborough officials
created the urban service area in 1993.
The idea is to direct most of the county's
growth into that area, keeping growth
compact and minimizing the public costs
of extending utilities and services
to new developments.

In the late 1990s, the
civic leaders in Lutz worked with the
county to write a community plan that
called for a "semirural community
character" east of N Dale Mabry
Highway. (West of Dale Mabry, the plan
foresaw a pattern of planned residential
communities.)

Despite the plan, the
area north of Curry Road ended up in
the urban service area.

Being in the urban service
area gives developers the chance to
build subdivisions with more houses
on smaller lots.

But those homes have
to be served by public water and sewer
lines. In contrast, rural homes on lots
of at least half an acre can be on wells
and septic tanks.

The civic association
learned of the area's status after a
landowner submitted and then withdrew
a rezoning request for a more densely
developed subdivision in 2007.

In response, the civic
association asked the county to consider
removing that piece of Lutz from the
urban service area.

Planners decided against
that for a variety of reasons, planning
commission team leader Stephen Griffin
said last week.

For one thing, planners
don't want to set a precedent of making
such changes until they establish a
process for considering them, Griffin
said.

Also, he said Lutz residents
seemed most concerned about the character
of the area and the density of development,
not whether new homes were on public
water and sewer.

Adding the proposed
rule should result in new development
"people can live with," he
said.

Finally, it would make
sense to address the issue through a
change to the Lutz Community Plan, but
there's no process in place to do that,
Griffin said. So for now planners propose
the change to the comprehensive plan's
future land use element.

Layne said she agrees
there needs to be a process to update
community plans, which outline a more
detailed vision for their communities
than the county's comprehensive plan
does.

But she advocates that
whatever process is created should only
allow community plans to be changed
every five to seven years. And she said
the changes should have to be approved
by a super majority of the County Commission
and be reviewed by a steering committee
of residents, educators and business
people, including those involved in
development, building and real estate
sales.

"The bottom line
is we want those people at the table,"
Layne said. "We want the large
landowners, the small ones, too, at
the table. It's their community, too."

Public hearings on the
proposed land use change are expected
this summer, with adoption in late fall.

Richard Danielson can
be reached at Danielson@sptimes.com
or (813) 269-5311.